


Lost in You

by ninemoons42



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Inception (2010), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception, Alternate Universe - Limbo, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Dream World, Dreamsharing, Gun Violence, Inspired by Music, Limbo, Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Major Character Injury, Marvel Universe Big Bang, Multiple Dream Levels, Serious Injuries, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-19
Updated: 2014-10-19
Packaged: 2018-02-21 12:39:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2468489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers lives and works in the shadowy world of dreamshare and its necessary evils: espionage, mind games, and dreaming of violent deaths and inflicting the same on himself and on others.</p><p>He knows how to lock his mind down, but he can't seem to stop that ghost of a thought from escaping: that someday Bucky Barnes, his companion into the warfare of dreams, will know that Steve loves him, that Steve would do anything and everything for him.</p><p>And now he has to risk everything to get Bucky back from Limbo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost in You

**Author's Note:**

> Art by Caputell: master post [HERE](http://caputell.tumblr.com/post/100355414808/marvel-bang-cover-art-for-the-fic-lost-in-you-by).

_one_  
The carpet beneath his feet is gray-on-gray stripes patched together, and he has to lift his feet with each step. He doesn’t have time to deal with the bright brief shock of discharge when he finds the right door. Lifting his feet also means that he can walk much more quietly, and quiet is good.

Quiet could be what keeps him alive.

Something familiar and heavy in his hand. Blued metal, dull sheen under the muted lights. Frosted sconces just at eye level. How breakable is the glass, he wonders. He could always use another weapon. A shard of glass, quick forceful punch to the throat. He can do that, he thinks. He might have already done that. 

The corridor branches and branches again. He checks carefully around each corner. He’s got a gun, and it is heavy in his hands, though the ammunition in his pockets seems heavier. 

He thinks someone might be laughing at him for that because he’s doing it wrong. Hard to understand _how_ he’s doing it wrong, when that’s what he knows and that’s what’s already saved lives, up to and including his own.

So, weight in his pockets.

The numbers on the doors are starting to repeat.

He stops at one of the intersections. Three corridors meeting at a corner. He tries to watch each path with equal vigilance. 

Someone must be coming his way.

He’s here to stop anyone and everyone from getting through to the next level. He’s the first line of defense.

He might be the _only_ line of defense, he thinks.

The gun in his hands changes. It was a SIG Sauer P226, sturdy and reassuring. Now it’s something much bigger. It seems to be a variation on a Heckler & Koch MP5.

How did that even happen?

He doesn’t know how he knows so much about these guns. Specifications, number of rounds in each magazine, modifications for covert carry. 

But when the first shadows begin to heave into view, he finds that he might actually be thankful for knowledge whose source he doesn’t know.

He dives for cover just as the first shots swing in his direction. He can hear the bullets. Muffled thuds into the floors and into the walls.

He scrambles around a table — he might have missed it in his earlier circuits, though it’s big enough and bulky enough that he should have noticed it — and closes his eyes. Deliberately tries to squash the instinct to breathe more rapidly. Hyperventilating will do him no good here. He needs to remain conscious and alert, so he needs to breathe correctly. Deep, careful breaths. 

Footsteps coming closer.

He opens his eyes, goes tense all over, inches out of cover just enough to track the incoming movements and to fire. He thinks he hears a voice telling him about precision and about speed. 

He decides on precision.

Half a second: just enough time for him to sight center of mass accurately and put two rounds right through. The follow-up shot goes between the eyes.

The first attacker goes down — there’s no time for him to celebrate or to reposition — the next enemies are running for him, shots going wild, and he’s better than that.

One Mozambique drill after another. No wasted bullets. Every shot has to count.

He clears the first charge.

One eye around the edge of the table as he reloads. Adrenaline powers through him and makes him aware of every movement. The material is smooth and damp under his fingertips. Sweat drips down into his eyes and he blinks, dashes his sleeve over his face.

Back into firing position. The second wave seems to be playing things more intelligently. They’re not charging him any more. Just a slow and deliberate advance.

A voice in his head whispers, relentless, almost familiar. Army ants. The unstoppable march onwards. Be prey or be predator.

In the brief intervals between one killing and another, he looks over his shoulder and all around, searching for more cover. 

Another quick breath, and he reloads. One more empty magazine to throw away.

Someone yells, somewhere in the warren of corridors.

He takes his finger off the trigger.

 _Thump._ Right behind him.

_Shit._

He doesn’t waste time or movements, doesn’t look over his shoulder. He rolls to the side, and comes up with the gun firing rapidly. Deafening chatter, rapid fall.

And around again. Turning as quickly as he can. The next group of attackers drops close enough for him to touch.

Time to run, he thinks, but where is he going to go, when the shouting starts and stops and is surrounding him, slowly, steadily?

The sweat that trickles down the back of his neck is cold, now.

Closer. Closer.

He reaches for the closest sconce. Doesn’t wince when he shatters it with one punch. The broken glass falls at his feet in jagged, wicked wedge-shapes. The one that he picks up bites deeply into the skin of his palm, into his fingertips. Harsh copper-taste on his tongue.

He draws blood, in his own turn, as he jams the shard into his nearest opponent’s eye. A scream that almost makes him freeze in his tracks. No time for that. Out, he pulls his makeshift blade out, and sends it into the throat of his next enemy.

More and more of them. He can hear them coming closer. 

He shoves the muzzle of his gun into someone’s mouth and fires.

Rinse. Repeat.

Until the gun clicks at him, futility in his hands.

He won’t scream.

He grits his teeth. His weapons are torn from him. 

He won’t scream.

Not even when the first punch lands, the first kick. 

Blood in his mouth — 

“Steve!”

No. No. Not even for that. Not the real voice.

“Steve. Please wake up.”

Wake up. Wake up.

What will happen if he wakes up?

“Steve.”

He knows that voice.

Steve opens his eyes, fully expecting to see shadowed faces, bloodied shoes, red-wet fists — 

But he opens his eyes to semi-darkness instead. To a familiar hairline crack running east to west in a familiar ceiling. To the shadows of windowpanes and a tree shaking in what seems to be a vigorous breeze. He cannot hear the wind because he is too busy listening to his own jackrabbiting pulse.

Gone the overturned table and the stink of cordite on his hands, and gone the taste of blood on his tongue.

“Steve?”

A voice. He knows that voice.

Bucky’s voice.

He pushes himself upright, cautiously. He almost expects to be wrapped in bandages, to be bleeding and bruised and battered. But moving is painless, and turning his head is easy.

Dark eyes looking at him. Deep affection, briefly frozen beneath a thin rime of worry. Hands, reaching out for him, radiating warmth, but stopping just short of making actual contact.

He, too, extends one hand. Unbroken, whole, except perhaps for the faint scar that crosses his palm and extends past his wrist. Not a wound he’d taken from this dream. No wounds for him, here, in the wide awake now.

Taking the offered hand feels like breaking the surface, somehow, as though he’d been struggling not to drown, held down somehow, and now the water’s far below him and he’s up in the air, freed, and capable of breathing again.

That might explain the part where he suddenly pulls Bucky in. Where he tries to crawl into Bucky’s lap, and why Bucky lets him. Where he wants to breathe in the musk of Bucky, the smell of his sweat and of his toothpaste and of the sandwiches they’d had for dinner.

“Steve,” Bucky says, once again, and he sounds relieved. One of his hands is cupped gently around the back of Steve’s head, and the other is stroking up and down Steve’s arm. “Hey. Everything’s going to be okay.” A pause. Time enough to steal a kiss. Bucky steals it back, and Steve lets him. “Bad dreams?”

“Didn’t feel like a dream,” Steve tells him. “It all felt so damn real. The smells, the sounds, the movements of my muscles. The — ” He swallows. He forces himself to finish the sentence. “The pain. Getting hit over and over again. Being punched and kicked, and I think that somewhere near the end, someone put a gun to my head, and I could see the finger move, pulling the trigger.”

“Sounds like a really bad nightmare. I’m glad you woke up.” Bucky sounds so gentle.

“So am I,” Steve whispers.

He holds on to Bucky. Lets himself fall into a daze, wrapped tightly in the circle of Bucky’s arms. Bucky’s quiet hum, like a song that doesn’t quite take shape, like words murmured just out of hearing. 

“Thank you,” Steve says, when Bucky pauses to take a deep breath.

“You’re welcome.”

When Bucky moves, he moves Steve with him. He goes willingly. First, he’s moved to Bucky’s side of the bed. He watches, relieved enough to feel curious, as Bucky puts his hand down flat on the sheets. 

“Soaked through,” Bucky says.

“Sorry,” Steve answers.

Bucky smiles and shakes his head. “We’ll just have to do the laundry later.” 

Steve watches him lay towels on the damp sheets. The corners don’t all line up precisely, and Steve’s side of the bed ends up looking like someone’s first attempt at imitating Rothko.

But when he shifts back to his side of the bed, when he makes contact with the towels, he can’t help but make a small sound of relief. It feels like the material is catching him, protecting him, and then there’s the added warmth and weight of Bucky, heavy and _there_ by his side.

Sleep comes again, and this time he almost fights it away — until Bucky begins to hum again, much more slowly than he did earlier. Gentle rhythm, coaxing, and Steve follows that rhythm and breathes it in, Bucky’s hand around his.

The sleep that comes is complete and total blackout, if still worryingly smelling like cordite and broken glass.

 _two_  
Between one sentence and the next Steve yawns, closes his eyes, falls asleep, and Bucky smiles, shakes his head, tries to remember what they had been talking about, so they can pick up where they left off.

He gets to his feet and moves through the bars of golden afternoon sunlight slanting onto the floor. The warmth is good on his bare feet. He pads back to their bedroom to retrieve the thinnest blanket he knows they have and throws it over Steve’s shoulders when he returns to the living room.

Steve’s been a little less skittish about going to sleep these days. That might be a good thing. There was a time when he’d stay up for hours and hours, when he’d be reluctant to close his eyes, because when he slept he dreamed, and he’d dream of nothing restful. He’d dream of being chased through cities full of shattered windows. Mountains thrust into the deepest night of winter — and from those dreams he’d wake up shivering and gasping about falling and not wanting to fall.

Bucky’s thankful no one has ever caught him wincing at the memory of Steve holding on to him, running his hands all over him, and whispering terrifying things: “I dreamed I fell into ice because I was trying to find you. I dreamed you fell into ice and came out, and when you came out you didn’t know who I was. I dreamed that you were watching when I died, and that you were too late to stop the bullet that stopped my heart.”

Even now, with his warm feet, Bucky shivers. He gives in to the impulse to hold Steve’s hand. 

If the old scars have not multiplied they have never really faded away, either, and he can still see them, dark and light lines alike, crisscrossing the creases of Steve’s palm and wrist and arm. 

Carefully, he lifts Steve’s hand to his mouth. He presses kisses to each knuckle, to each fingertip. Hard work, hard years, days of running and fighting and trying to survive.

Steve mutters in his sleep, and Bucky leans in, trying to listen.

The words that come out might not even be in English, and he remembers listening to Steve’s careful over-enunciation of the sounds of the Romanian language. Quiet curses under his breath, that to Bucky had sounded just a little bit like infernal songs — all in good tune, even haunting; that had always been one of the skills that Steve never liked to talk about for some strange reason — but it sounded like the depths of hell anyway.

Bucky’s always been much better with the rest of the Romance languages: he can almost pass for a native speaker of Italian, and he remembers a lot of the instances when he’d had to bail Steve out of trouble in French or in Spanish. Or had that been Portuguese? The memory has almost completely slipped through his fingers.

Perhaps that’s the other thing that he needs to worry about: that he is beginning to lose track of his own memories, or that there are memories in his head that he can’t trace to any source.

Case in point: he blinks, now, and he looks at the pieces lined up neatly on the small table next to Steve’s oversized feet. Springs and pins and the unmistakable curved shape that can only be a trigger, attached to the rest of its assembly. 

The gun is somewhere between _too small_ and _not enough stopping power_ , and there are soft rags and cleaning implements, and he can actually see the shapes of his own hands in the items he’s already put down.

He’s still torn somewhere between disbelief and memory when he sits back down to his task. 

As if detached from what’s actually going on, from the deliberate sweep of cloth to the last-minute eyeballing of each part, he watches himself finish cleaning the gun. Watches his own hands put the entire complicated set of interlocking mechanisms back together. The only thing that’s missing is a fresh magazine and a round in the chamber.

He knows where the box of ammunition is, and he doesn’t want to think about why there’s a box of ammunition in this house.

The reassembled gun fits perfectly into Bucky’s hands, and he doesn’t know why he knows what he needs to do with it. Finger off the trigger at all times. A constant awareness of what he’s pointing it at, none of which includes Steve in his oblivious slumber, or Bucky’s own two feet, or the gradually lowering shadows coming in through the windows.

Bucky reaches for the nearest lamp and switches it on, and the golden light that fills this corner of the room doesn’t look like sunlight at all. This light falls wan and pallid onto Steve’s feet, onto Bucky’s skin, and he almost starts when he sees the lines and the veins and the dark little spots on the back of his own hand.

He puts the gun away. Inches closer towards Steve, who hasn’t moved in all this time, except to snore very softly. A quiet buzz. Nothing strange or offensive or congested about it. 

Hard to find the differences when Bucky leans in to examine his own hands, to examine Steve’s for comparison. Age, weakness, creeping into the room and into their bodies, on slow and stealthy feet. 

What a surprise, Bucky thinks, as he watches Steve shift onto his back at last, his face tilting towards the lamplight. It’s unfair. There are lines in the corners of Steve’s eyes, and there are faint arcs framing the edges of where Steve’s smile would begin, but that’s it — brushing those lines aside, Steve doesn’t look a day over the prime of his life.

How old are they, Bucky wonders, idly. There must be a number of some kind attached to the wrinkles on their hands, to his need to keep warm, and to the silver that he’s already spotted in his own hair.

A rustle, a sigh, and a word. Mostly a question. “Bucky,” Steve says.

Bucky blinks. Steve is struggling to push the blanket away. His eyes are half-full of sleep.

“Hey, Steve,” he answers, eventually, and he goes when Steve beckons him closer, when Steve kisses him. Steve’s hands are almost hot on his arm and on the back of his neck. Fingertips tracing trembling circles into his scalp. “Are you okay?”

“I just need to wake up,” Steve says.

 _three_  
The floor shifts sullenly, reluctantly, beneath his feet, and he keeps his head bowed until the dust settles once again — and only then does he reach for another magazine. He reloads his gun, drops it back into its holster, and his actions are far removed from his thoughts.

The voice that had been speaking before resumes: “...Danvers and Hill have been located and they’re making their way back — ”

“So answer my question already,” Steve barks. He doesn’t mean to be rude. He can’t help but be brusque. Explosions and gunfire in the not-too-far distance, and some of those heavy rumbling sounds might actually be coming closer, and this room is by no means shelter for one, much less shelter for half a dozen.

He might be able to name everyone here, if he were thinking more calmly. All he can do right now is focus on the redhead with the calculating eyes, with the half-feral grip on a sawed-off shotgun. Or perhaps it might be a cut-down carbine of some sort. He won’t be able to know if he doesn’t get any closer, and right now he has no time to get any closer to her.

A sense of urgency roils in his gut. What are they doing here, and who are these people, and why are they all waiting on him? Who in their right minds would actually nominate _him_ to be the leader of a job like this, or of any job at all? Who in their right minds can still trust him now? It’s not like his breakdown didn’t make the news, or at least the kind of news that people like the ones clustered around him, watching warily, paid attention to.

“What question?” the redhead asks, eventually.

He bares his teeth at her. “ _All present and accounted for?_ ”

The room itself seems to heave up and down, bouncing in a this-is-not-fun-please-stop-the-ride-I-want-to-get-off manner, and even he has difficulty keeping his feet through the next set of shocks.

The woman’s voice is steady, and also full of dread. “No.”

“How many missing?” he asks, once he’s reasonably sure they can all hear him over the groan of straining masonry and still-approaching things going boom.

“Two or three more at most.”

He allows himself one oath. Just the one. The worst one he knows.

For some reason, the man with the salt-and-pepper hair flinches, tries to make himself smaller, though he has broader shoulders and a heavier build than the woman who’s standing over him.

Steve shakes his head, and doesn’t apologize. He just keeps staring at the redhead. “Then what are you waiting for? Did we or did we not draw up any contingency plans for this particular set of possibilities?”

“We did, but you said that we weren’t to try striking out on our own.”

“And with good reason,” he growls, and how does he know that at all? Why does he keep listening to the warning bells in the back of his head, and to the slow, slow monolithic pulse that permeates the room, that shakes the very marrow of his bones, that thrums in every last inch of his skin? “And now you’re not striking out on your own if I’m telling you to get moving. Split up into pairs, get moving, and get back here in time for the kick!”

He watches them move: even the man with the salt-and-pepper hair is coaxed to his feet by a man with tight coils of flesh-tone cord leading into his ears, and as they whisper to each other the fear in their faces dissolves into almost identical masks of grim determination.

When he’s left alone with the nagging sense that there’s someone missing, that he shouldn’t be alone in the first place because everyone else has a companion or someone to watch his or her back and the person who does that for him is missing, he remembers his own words, and he catches himself wondering, what is a kick, coupled with, what is the kick I’m waiting for?

He looks around the corners of the room. The walls shiver, visibly, and the cracks appear and grow and spread, joining across the length and breadth of the stressed stones. 

Someone is supposed to be here, watching his back. Someone whose back he’s supposed to be watching.

He gropes for the name, and finds the sound frozen on the tip of his tongue, and he can’t say it out loud. Can’t force that name out. Remembering and forgetting in the same instant. 

Instead, he gets the impression of a gun, drawn in self-defense and drawn to protect, and he reaches out for that nonexistent shadow, for the one who’s missing — 

_four_  
Somewhere, in a room that is full of sunlight and the quiet mournful pulse of a PASIV in use, the man with the salt-and-pepper hair crosses his arms over his chest and winces, very fractionally, just enough for the expression to be seen. “Raise your hands if you’re not surprised,” he says, before raising his own hand.

The others in the room raise their hands as well. 

“They had to be together in order to function properly,” the woman in the leather jacket says, sounding weary. The words are only a little garbled. She is chewing on a lock of her own hair, bright red strands in the sunlight. 

“Never one without the other,” the man concurs. “Does anyone know anything about the sedatives in use?”

“Sedatives. Yeah.” The man who’s speaking now has pale hair cropped almost all the way down to his scalp. “Those are only the best that money can buy or a talented Chemist can come up with. And when I say _the best_ , I mean _the worst_. Separately, each sedative is already more than enough to ensure complete sensory knock-out. Put them all together, and you may never wake up. Not even if you had a kick of one kind or another.” He wraps a piece of cloth around his hand and touches the loaded PASIV. Three vials, and a perfectly clear mixture in the IV lines.

Two sleepers arranged next to one another. 

One of them is holding the other’s hand.

The display on the PASIV that would normally show a timer counting down is blank and black.

“The last time anyone saw him,” and the man with the grizzled hair gestures to the man laid out on the couch as though he were sleeping, “where in the dream was he?”

“Holding down the last level,” the redhead answers. “And I surrounded him with a second labyrinth, just as he asked, just as we had planned.”

“But something got through.”

The redhead nods, once, looking grave and pinched. “One shot, right in the gut. And then I lost him and we had to kick out.”

“And then Steve just had to follow him down,” the blond mutters. “Just couldn’t fucking help himself — ”

“Do you think they found each other — in there? Wherever there might be?”

The grizzled man shakes his head. “My knowledge of that particular part of all of this is precisely zero. We’ve only got a few accounts from people who fell in and managed to climb out — we don’t even have to mention the names, they’re our own community’s version of a virus, they’re the first names that come to mind whenever anyone of us thinks about the danger of falling into limbo.”

“We could ask,” the blond says, eventually, half-heartedly.

In this room with the two sleepers, the PASIV is in use and the sedatives are flowing, and no one looks at the bandages wrapped around the stomach of the man on the couch.

No one wants to talk about the red seeping through those bandages.

 _five_  
Sometimes they sleep in because they’ve been up half the night talking about all kinds of memories and all the things that cross their minds, and this is one of those mornings — only when Steve glances out the window, he actually thinks it might still be somewhere around midnight, despite the red numbers on the clock next to the bed.

“Bucky,” he says, and he carefully shakes the nearest part of Bucky he can reach, which happens to be his shoulder. There is a bruise on it that Steve doesn’t remember seeing. He wonders what happened to Bucky and where that bruise came from. “Bucky, wake up.”

“What is it?” Groggy, bleary, stumbling over the S — Bucky wakes quickly and easily, but that doesn’t always mean that he’s entirely coherent when he wakes. “Steve, it’s — ten in the morning.”

Steve nods, and waits for the other shoe to drop.

He watches Bucky squint at his own clock, and then look balefully out the windows, at the swollen swirling clouds, at the darkness that presses down, at the silent wind that wails unheard. “What the fuck,” he says, eventually, the words coming slow and shocked.

“And that’s why I woke you up,” Steve says, falling back into the pillows. “Hard to believe what I was seeing with my own eyes. Needed confirmation.”

“World looks like someone’s idea of a nightmare,” Bucky says, not only following suit but also trying to put his arms around Steve’s waist.

Steve lets him.

“Were we supposed to be doing anything today? Because I vote we say _fuck it_ and not get out of bed. I’m not putting one foot out the door. It’s going to rain in, what, ten minutes? Less?”

Bucky’s not even finished with the sentence when there’s a powerful flash of lightning, and Steve’s eyes catch the luminous line leaping from lowering cloud to lowering cloud.

He doesn’t know why he doesn’t move, why he breathlessly ticks off the seconds to the thunder, and it’s like being smashed up and down every nerve in his body when the boom hits, just a few heartbeats after.

Something in the house shrieks softly, and there’s a far quieter _thump_ , and the clock on Steve’s table clicks and goes faceless and blank.

“Lost power,” Bucky says. His fingers on the switch for the lamp on his table. Futile clicks. The light doesn’t turn on or off. 

They hold on to each other’s hands in the murk and in the crash of the storm. 

The rain rushes at the windows in a flurry of rapid pattering impacts — only for a moment, though, because then it all comes torrenting down. It becomes an inundation. Water pours upon the world outside, drowning out even the sullen clouds.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Bucky’s not whispering at all, and yet Steve can barely hear him; that’s how loud the rain is. 

He doesn’t reply, not in words. Instead he reaches for the comforter and hauls it up the length of the bed, tucking it around himself and around Bucky, the two of them instinctively drawing closer together, sharing warmth and scant shelter.

He lets Bucky shift around and shift him around, and when he’s the little spoon and Bucky has planted his chin on Steve’s shoulder he grabs both of Bucky’s hands and holds on as best as he can.

The silence between them grows warm and soft and safe, a far cry from the storm’s fury as it rages on outside the windows.

Eventually, Bucky breaks the silence, a reverent whisper: “What woke you up in the first place?”

Steve blinks, and thinks about it, and tries to remember.

Dreams of a room full of friendly shadows and anticipatory laughter and whispering. A single bright flower in a vase — an unidentifiable flower, in a color he can’t remember. Metal that was warmer than skin, scratched and worn and patinated — beautiful. A symbol of something that was far more important than just words.

“Steve,” Bucky says, after a moment.

“I can’t remember if there’s a birthday coming up. Or an anniversary. Some kind of occasion I can’t miss, or we can’t miss,” he says, and even as he tries to give voice to the words he knows he’s starting to blush, cold embarrassment worming its way into the warmth of the bed. He remembers some things, and he forgets others, and he’s not entirely sure he understands why something like this is happening to him.

The arms around him go still for a moment, and then squeeze gently again, and Steve blows out a breath that might be relieved and might still be embarrassed. “I think we already had the conversation about our birthdays; we agreed we weren’t really going to do anything special for them this year. Not everyone wants to be reminded of numbers ticking upward, you said.” Bucky’s words are scattered with soft kisses, and Steve shivers, but not because of the storm.

“So it’s an anniversary,” Steve says, and he gets his own back by raising their joined hands, by catching one of Bucky’s fingertips in his mouth. He runs his tongue over the fine lines and ridges of a fingerprint. “Why is that particular number ticking upward to be celebrated when we have to ignore the rest?”

That gets him a quiet, almost fond, chuckle. “Because that particular number is the number of years I’ve been putting up with you, punk,” and the old nickname, used now in affection, makes Steve grin. “I should have been nominated for sainthood by now,” Bucky continues. “Because you’ve been taking stupid chances, doing stupid things, for all the time I’ve known you, and somehow you’re still alive and I haven’t simply keeled over stone-dead from worry.”

“Or from cleaning up my messes,” Steve offers as an olive branch.

“Or from cleaning up your messes.” Bucky’s kiss is open-mouthed, and his words rumble over the sensitive skin just below Steve’s ear, making Steve sigh and tilt his head for better access. “Like I said, it’s a wonder I haven’t died yet.”

“It is,” Steve says, and he turns over and pushes Bucky back into the pillows.

An unnamed fear whispers in the back of his head, an unspoken danger, something like the storm, inexorable and far too powerful for any one man, any one mind, to fight.

He pushes it away, pushes the threat of oblivion out of his head. He concentrates on kissing Bucky’s mouth, Bucky’s throat, the hollow between Bucky’s collar bones. 

“Something on your mind, Steve?” Bucky asks in a soft, ragged voice.

“Just you,” Steve lies, and gets his fingers beneath Bucky’s t-shirt, pulls it up and away to bare more skin. The material is soft and pilled around the seams, and it clings with equal fervor to Steve’s hands and to Bucky’s chest and broad shoulders. 

Once the shirt’s gone, Steve applies himself to the planes and to the scars and to the angles of Bucky’s body. Pale remnants of old wounds. Taut skin stretched over muscle, quiescent now, yielding to Steve’s explorations, but the memories of Bucky getting into fights at his side are clear and almost far too real: the clean sweep of movement, the pure force of him, coiling up and then throwing a punch, a kick, throwing his enemies to the ground — unstoppable power.

Steve kisses his way up and down Bucky’s skin, slow and deliberate, and sometimes the kiss is little more than a fleeting touch that makes Bucky squirm and hiss about being ticklish, and sometimes the kiss has teeth and leaves behind the bright blot of a bruise, and that’s the kind of kiss that makes Bucky sigh and say Steve’s name, soft and profanely reverent.

Bucky’s fingers wound in his hair, and Bucky’s sweat heavy on his tongue.

There’s a slightly desperate look in Bucky’s eyes when Steve relents and kisses him full on the mouth once again. Wide-eyed need written all over Bucky’s face, burning up in Bucky’s fingertips.

Steve tugs gently on the waistband of Bucky’s boxer shorts, and the word that he gets for an answer is breathy and fierce and full of need: “Please.”

And then: “You too,” Bucky says, when he’s been stripped down to his skin.

Steve smiles, shakes his head gently, presses a thoughtful kiss to the hollow of Bucky’s throat. “Maybe later.”

Bucky stops protesting when Steve turns him over, when Steve leaves bite marks and sloppy open-mouthed kisses in the small of his back — and lower. 

This is something he knows, Steve thinks; this is something he’s more than merely familiar with. The pulse in Bucky’s skin, and how it speeds and slows and hammers. The taste of him, of his salt and of his musk. The shape of him, and the curve of his ass. Steve looks at his own fingers pressing temporary dimples into Bucky’s skin and can’t stop shaking. 

“Steve,” Bucky asks.

“God, I want you so much,” Steve whispers. He’s wanted this, he’s thought about this, he’s longed for this; it’s a dream come true, now, and he doesn’t wait for Bucky to react — though he does get a long, low, fervent groan that sounds very much like “Oh god please — ” 

Bucky lets him pry into the most intimate spaces of his body — and Steve is shameless and takes terrible advantage. Licks at Bucky’s entrance, and Bucky doesn’t fight him, just goes limp on the bed, appreciative obscenities and gasps falling from his mouth, filling up the hush of the room that is no longer paying attention to the storm.

Steve alternates between lapping at him and pushing the tip of his tongue in, and eventually Bucky relaxes enough that Steve can drive one and then two fingers into him, fucking him, slowly at first and then gradually faster, hooking his fingertips this way and that and making Bucky thrust recklessly into the sheets, moaning as he goes, loud enough to begin to rival the storm.

He applies his mouth once more to Bucky’s skin, whispers encouragement and filthy words between bites. “Come on, Buck, give it up for me, I wanna see you — ”

Then he brushes his fingertips against Bucky’s prostate, and Bucky goes rigid beneath his hands and mouth, and the little that Steve can see of his face in the semi-darkness is contorted in beautiful lust, and he does it again — and Bucky says his name, broken and gorgeous, and comes. Steve can feel the shocks of it, battering Bucky’s body, and it almost breaks him, too — he gets up on his knees and pulls his cock out, his fist trembling around its rigid length, pulling and pulling and then he’s coming, he’s watching his come splatter onto Bucky’s thighs, the small of Bucky’s back.

“Fuck,” Steve says when he gets his breath back, and Bucky laughs, soft and satisfied, and Steve still can’t shake the feeling that this is borrowed time, stolen time, time flowing strangely, like it might in dreams — 

_six_  
Bucky blinks up into the jewel-brightness of a late-autumn sky: an unnatural blue, far too endless for his liking, with wisps of clouds laid out like spiderwebs.

He’s never liked spiders, and he’s never been a fan of cobwebs. Dust and prey trapped and wound into dark strands, and at the center of it, devouring and patient, the spider in its lair.

He feels like that spider, some days, and he feels like its prey too. Caught fast, held in claws, sharp and pricking, always on the edge of drawing blood.

Steve is reading a book next to him, and the strange thing about the book is that as soon as Bucky glances at it and then glances away, he can’t remember what he’s just seen on the page. It’s as if the words were flowing away.

What is happening, he wonders, away from this seeming idyll, away from the rooms of the house that they share, away from the confines of their bed?

He thinks of words. He thinks of names. People, colleagues, family, friends. 

Do they have those here?

Why don’t they see those people?

Who is here in this place with them?

Bucky levers himself up from the grass. Sweat clings to the back of his neck, to the space between his shoulder blades, and the wind picks up, and he almost shivers at the bite in the air.

Steve doesn’t seem to notice that, and as Bucky watches, he turns a page, squints, scrubs his palm over his eyes, and goes back to reading.

He should be asking questions about why and how Steve can be so oblivious now. But they can wait. He has something else to do, first.

He settles in the grass, sits cross-legged, and looks around. An expanse of what must be public space, because beyond Steve there’s a group of children playing jump rope. The high whine of bicycles being ridden quickly, up a gentle slope and then down again, and the laughter of the teenagers as they spin around each other in playful circles. A woman in torn-up jeans, sitting in the branches of a tree, binoculars aimed upwards.

Faces and voices and movements, and they are almost familiar, but there’re no names that come to Bucky’s mind. 

Who are these people?

He thinks about the house. There’s a mailbox out on the edge of their little patch of front lawn, and he’s never seen anything go into that mailbox, nor does he remember putting anything into it to be sent out into the world.

There is a telephone in the study, and one in the kitchen, and he doesn’t know what they sound like when they ring, because they’ve never rung, never heralded an incoming call.

And — briefly — he considers the neighbors. Do they have any of those? He thinks he can remember seeing lights from the houses on the street. He thinks he doesn’t remember seeing the silhouettes of people in those lights. 

Did he and Steve retire? 

Are they old enough to have retired, to have stepped back from the world that they used to know?

What was that world like?

Bucky tips his head back, and the clouds have moved, and the breeze is starting to turn into something fresher, something stronger.

Still the children play, and every now and then they glance back in his direction, and Bucky thinks that he might want to flinch back from those eyes. Sharp glances.

Steve turns another page, and the sound of the paper rustling is somehow loud, and Bucky blinks and stares at Steve as he eventually closes the book and sits up. A sweet smile. A warm hand around Bucky’s wrist. “Hey,” Steve says. “Sorry about that. I got kind of lost in the story.”

Bucky makes himself stop staring at the book. He makes himself look at Steve. He makes himself not think about the questions he’s piling up in his mind. He says, “It must have been a good story.”

“You know, I think it was.”

Steve rolls up to his feet, then, and maybe that smooth movement puts the lie to the idea that they’ve retired. Maybe Steve is still strong — he’s certainly still got enough in him to pull Bucky up after him, one easy motion and Bucky goes from sitting down to standing up. The blood rushes to his head and the world spins around him, and his anchor is Steve’s hand, steady around his.

“Tell me about the story,” Bucky says, following in Steve’s wake. They make their way through a wrought-iron fence, something that looks familiar, and something that looks dark and strange.

Steve talks, and Bucky tries to listen, but he still doesn’t know what the story’s about, even as they walk up to their front door, hand-in-hand.

 _seven_  
“Limbo,” the redhead says. She purses her lips. “And what kind of Limbo could we possibly be talking about here?”

The man with the close-cropped hair is once again in the room with her. He glances at the two sleepers, who have not moved from their positions, with eyes that are full of pity and sympathy and an underlying fear. “There are kinds? I thought there was just the one kind of Limbo, the kind you never get out of — ”

“If that’s true, then Dominick Cobb never left the Limbo he first fell into with his wife.” The redhead folds her arms over her chest. “And I know for a fact that that is not true. I’ve interviewed him, you know.”

“All I know is that Dominick Cobb found a _very deep hole_ to vanish into, and now I know that you found him. That makes just the one of you. Should we be afraid of your ninja look-for-the-crazy-ex-dreamsharing-savant skills? Did you manage to find Eames and especially _Arthur_ , I still owe that motherfucker at least one ass-kicking, whether in dreams or outside of them?”

“I did not go looking for them. As far as the grapevine can tell, neither of them actually had that experience. I looked for the Architect they recruited for the Fischer-Morrow job instead. The girl. Ariadne — Mann, if I remember her last name correctly. She described a Limbo that matched up with Cobb’s first attempt at an inception. No description of that place could be said to match the one of Saito’s Limbo. So I am forced to conclude that there must be — kinds. That we all have potential Limbos inside our heads, and that each iteration is unique to each of us.”

The third person in the room, the man with the grizzled hair, sighs. When he glances at the sleepers’ faces he can see that they are not completely expressionless. The one still on the couch seems to be frowning — or seems to be in some kind of pain. “So in this case, which would be the better of two possible Limbos? The one in the head of someone who is dying slowly, or the one in the head of the person who jumped into that dying mind?”

The redhead shivers. “I do not know. And I cannot tell.”

“And we have to bring them out. Have to go in there, and find them. Or is there any point in pulling them out?”

“The job requires Steve,” the redhead says. “And he won’t do this without Bucky.”

“Bucky’s _dying_.”

“So you said. So I believe. So what is left?” 

A helpless shrug. “I don’t know.”

 _eight_  
The only thing Bucky allows him to do in the kitchen these days is work with knives.

Steve does not protest this rule, and does not appeal it either. He’s still smarting from the past three times he botched up a simple task. Something like boiling water. Like trying to make a simple cup of coffee. 

So Steve doesn’t cook, not exactly. He participates in preparation. It’s Steve’s job to cut things up, to chop things into uniform pieces, and he’s very good at it.

The onion falls easily into small and neat squares under his very sharp and very large knife. 

Every now and then, he blinks away the tears from the fumes rising up from the onion.

Next after the onions is a startlingly large amount of garlic, but this is a dish that Bucky has cooked before, and always with great success, so Steve doesn’t flinch away from the smell that lingers on his knife and on his skin. It’s almost, almost akin to the smell of home — the home that they’d had when they were much younger.

That must have been a long time ago, Steve thinks as he sweeps up the bits of garlic and continues to mince. When he looks at Bucky now, his eyes almost always go straight to the silver strands in Bucky’s dark hair. Impossible to miss their presence. 

There are silver strands in his own hair, too — a little bit harder to see, since he’s always had light-colored hair, only darkening a little towards the roots. But he finds them more and more often on his pillow now, or on the comb he uses to tame the unruly bits, and that means time must have been passing, for the two of them to be sporting those tell-tale signs.

Once he’s done with the aromatics, he transfers them to the little bowls that Bucky has already set out for him, and he takes the cutting board and the knife to the sink. The water runs soothingly over his hands, gradually warming up, and when it’s almost at a temperature to scald he starts working with the soap and the scrubbing sponge.

The rhythm of his movements is lulling, especially when combined with the sound of the running water — and Steve closes his eyes for a minute, up to his wrists in hot suds —

The knife slips.

Sharp fierce stinging pain, slashing across the palm of his hand.

Steve hisses, and puts his hand back under the stream of running water, and the suds that cling to the sink and to the cutting board gradually turn red before flowing down the drain.

“Steve,” Bucky says very gently. He is suddenly standing next to Steve, rinsing his hands before taking Steve’s injured hand and holding it carefully.

“I’m all right,” Steve says.

The truth is that he’s not. It’s as if the pain of the slashed palm has called up the memory of other aches, other pains. These memories are of pricking and of puncturing, and they run hot flashes of piercing pain into Steve’s forearms. Up and down, invisible pockmarks in his skin, from wrist to the inside of his elbow.

They seem to be confined to the visible lines of his veins, deep blue against his skin.

“Talk to me, Steve,” Bucky says, and now he sounds worried.

“I’m all right,” Steve tries again.

“You might be, and you’re no longer bleeding, but I’m standing right next to you, and you don’t feel all right.”

“I don’t know why the rest of me hurts,” Steve says, when he surrenders to the concern in Bucky’s eyes. 

“The rest of you?”

Steve lifts his hands out of the sink. Hot water, slowly cooling, and he sweeps his fingertips down from the inside of his elbow to the palm. “Hurts here, too. Like needles in my skin. A lot of them. I think I’d be able to remember if I did anything like that, or if we did.”

Bucky shakes his head. “Yes, or I would. Do you want me to find the first-aid kit?”

“I guess,” Steve says, and he feels a little lost when Bucky steps away from him. He wants to follow Bucky. He wants to keep Bucky in sight.

Lately he’s been living with, and running from, and failing to manage, the constant low-level dread of something small and silly and stuck under his skin.

He keeps thinking that if he takes his eyes off Bucky, Bucky will disappear.

He’s not quite gone so far as to start following Bucky around, but right now, as he cranes his neck trying to keep Bucky in sight, he almost wishes he could do that.

His new wound is oriented differently from the old scar: the old scar that runs vertically to his wrist, and the new wound that cuts across it at right angles, so it looks like he’s cut a cross into himself. 

Some days, he thinks he almost remembers what had caused that long-faded wound, that long-healed line.

“Steve,” Bucky says when he appears once again.

Steve lets himself be led to another counter and watches Bucky’s hands as they clean and bandage him up, and the pain in his forearms recedes, but never really leaves him.

 _nine_  
Bucky can still feel the remains of sticky sweat and Steve on his skin when he wakes up.

When he stretches his arms over his head, when he tenses and then relaxes every muscle in his body, he can feel the aches and the pains and the bruises that Steve’s left on him.

There’s a rather prominent hickey on his inner thigh in the exact shape of Steve’s mouth: broken blood vessels and an extensive eruption of angry red and purple.

Bucky grins to himself as he traces the outline of that bruise, and of the one just below his right nipple, and — although he cannot see this third one — the one just below the nape of his neck.

If he wears the wrong shirt today, the edges of that third mark will be visible for all to see, and they’ll know how he’s spent his early morning.

He doesn’t mind. Not really. It feels good to remember. It feels good to think about it. Waking up to Steve’s hands on him, to Steve’s mouth kissing him. The hot rush of Steve’s breath against his skin, and the eager wetness slicking Steve’s cock, faintly bitter on Bucky’s tongue. Turning the tables on Steve: flipping Steve into the covers. Hearing his name falling from Steve’s lips, the sounds deteriorating into obscenities and then into wordless cries.

The weight of Steve’s legs wrapped around Bucky’s waist, and the beautiful lines etched into Steve’s face as Bucky thrust into him, slow and hard and steady. 

He thinks of how tight and how needy Steve had been, and almost immediately has to get himself off again: here, in the sheets that still smell faintly of Steve’s sweat, in the room that still contains echoes of Steve’s cries in the corners.

Slowly, slowly, he makes himself linger over every stroke, and he whispers Steve’s name as though it were a prayer.

Bucky comes, wide-eyed and open-mouthed and silent, and he shivers in the sweat-slicked sheets as he comes down from the high of a Steve who didn’t even need to be there to shatter him so sweetly, so completely.

There’s a text message waiting for him after he finally brings himself to get up and make a belated start to the day:

 _I’ll be working and eating at the usual place today; come join me when you’re up._

And:

_They have the roast dish you like so much. Should I tell them to hold an order for you?_

Bucky laughs softly, and is distracted enough that he buttons up his shirt wrong and has to start over with the fiddly process all over again. It’s all right. It’s worth it. He appreciates that Steve thinks of him and wants to do nice things for him, like make sure there’s an order of that roast dish set aside for him, even when Steve himself can’t get enough of that very same roast dish and has been known to put three plates of it away at a single meal.

Before he leaves, Bucky prowls carefully through the house that they share, making sure that the doors and windows are securely closed. 

The sun is a source of faraway warmth and watery light in the sky when he makes it out the door.

He vaguely remembers another day, not the first nor even the last, on which he’d watched faces with suspicion. People who might or might not have looked familiar, who might or might not have had threatening looks in their eyes when they glanced Bucky’s way.

He tries to think about why he acts the way he does.

A car pulls carefully into a parking space across the street from him, and Bucky feels the inexplicable, powerful need to drop into some kind of combat crouch. To reach for a weapon that he’s not actually carrying. He’s expecting a gun in his hand, or at the very least some kind of combat knife, black from pommel to the sharp point.

As it is, all he can do is freeze in his tracks, try to turn sideways on to the car, in the hopes of presenting a far smaller target to whoever’s in there.

When the woman who’d been driving parks, when she lets four large dogs out of the back seat, neon-colorful leashes and lolling pink tongues, Bucky nearly falls to the sidewalk.

He eventually manages to gather himself back together, and he even manages to leg it all the way to the diner that he and Steve like so much.

The young waiter waves him genially in the direction of the booth where Steve’s squinting at a bundle of papers, and Bucky swallows, hopes he doesn’t look too flushed, when he slides into the seat opposite.

Even though Steve doesn’t look up from his work right away, he still has a warm smile for Bucky. “Be with you in a moment,” he says, pushing his reading glasses back into place. 

“Take your time.” Bucky means it. He’s grateful Steve is distracted. He’s grateful the waiter doesn’t notice the shaking of his hands, of his voice, when he orders a fresh pot of coffee and a glass of orange juice.

He has to calm down. He has to stop biting his lip and clenching his hands into fists and looking from side to side. The faces in this diner, at least, seem welcoming, or perhaps less threatening than he thinks the world to be. 

And then he draws in a shocked, near-soundless breath when Steve’s hand touches his wrist.

His head snaps up and he sees worry in Steve’s eyes.

“Everything all right?”

Bucky forces himself to take another calming breath. He leans in. Doesn’t know why he’s compelled to whisper. “I — do you ever get the feeling,” he says, a little desperately, “that there might be people out there who might be out to get us? And then did you ever think that maybe you’re just seeing things, that maybe you’re just remembering something from the past, something you might have used to do, something _I_ might have done with you?”

Steve blinks.

Bucky holds his breath, tries to make himself apologize, tries to laugh it all off. A bad joke. Not one of his best efforts. 

The coffee arrives, and so does the orange juice, and Bucky watches as Steve eyes the waiter carefully. A scatter of cutlery on the table, light catching on the points and the edges.

Bucky tries to breathe.

When the waiter’s gone, he watches Steve look around anxiously before leaning in and whispering, “You too?”

The first reaction is paralyzing relief; the second, coming hard on the heels of the first, is incandescent worry. It makes him lean in and seize one of Steve’s hands. “Did anything actually happen to you?”

Steve shakes his head, slowly. “No. No, I was okay, nothing happened. But — it’s like I have to follow this weird process. I always have to look over my shoulder. To check that everything behind me is clear. That I always know where all of the exits are.”

“Oh, god, you too,” Bucky says, repeating after Steve, grateful for the fact that he’s sitting down. He thinks he might have fallen down otherwise, splat onto his face like he didn’t earlier.

“It’s like an overwhelming need to protect you. To protect myself. To protect others,” Steve finishes.

Bucky nods, knowing exactly what that’s like, and knowing nothing about why they know, why they share such impulses.

 _ten_  
“Xavier and Lehnsherr too? What were they _thinking_?” The redhead paces, and her words keep time with the agitated rhythm of her heels. 

“What kills me,” says the man with the close-cropped hair, “is that those two actually went _searching_ for Limbo. They put their affairs in order, sent out a coded message to certain parties, and then — they just went down together.”

“How did they come back up?”

“Good question. One that I don’t have any answers for, or at least none that would be easy to understand. I spoke to them after they woke up, and I tried to ask them questions, and all they could tell me was that Limbo was subjective and that there were certain things about reality that were non-negotiable and rather more objective than most.” The last few words are accompanied by finger-quotes.

The redhead answers with a skeptical moue. 

“So are you sure you want to call them in to consult on this one?”

“I may not have a choice. As you said: they came back up. And it’s not as if it were possible for us to actually speak with the head of Proclus Global. _Hello, Mister Saito, we heard you were pulled out of Limbo by someone who might well be an informal expert in that place of subconscious unknowns. We’d like to talk to you about your current state of mind, or sanity, or whatever you’re actually calling it._ ”

The man with the close-cropped hair taps his fingers on the nearest available flat surface: the top of the PASIV that is still working, still mournfully breathing, still pumping sedatives into Steve and Bucky. “What happens,” and his words come out slow and hesitant and far too careful, freighted down with worry. “What happens if in waking them up we lose them?”

“What if waking them up is the only way we can save them?”

 _eleven_  
Every time he wakes he has to fight down the urge to throw up.

He hurts.

The lingering fever is still sitting deep in his skin, mocking him, leaving him swimming in the sweat-soaked sheets.

Bucky has gone out for a few more supplies, a little more medicine, and Steve didn’t want him to leave, but had to let him go.

Breathing is heavy and awful and difficult. The sickness is a weight that presses down on him.

“Bucky,” Steve tries to say, but the end of the word is lost in a violent fit of coughing, and the desperate urge to puke, only there’s nothing in his mouth but the dry grit of medicine, and there’s nothing in his stomach but a few glasses of water.

He forces himself up from the bed, and forces himself to walk to the bathroom. The water that pours from the tap is lukewarm, and he gulps it up thirstily, his cupped hands shaking.

He almost immediately has to swallow, hard, because he doesn’t want to throw up what he’s just been drinking.

The water trickles into his soaked-through shirt, and for a moment he feels relief. Coolness.

But even as he glances at the shower, he can’t make himself get in. The bed. The bed is calling him. Keeping upright is a struggle.

Bucky is not here, and Steve is alone, and he wants to be awake so he can listen for Bucky coming in, coming home. Bucky’s been the only thing that’s made this sudden illness so bearable. Bucky’s voice, Bucky reading quietly next to him, Bucky’s weight that Steve can’t help but gravitate to, even as he tosses and turns and drops precipitously into sleep that brings him no rest.

There’s a step in the hallway, and it’s coming closer, and it doesn’t sound like Bucky’s step at all.

Steve half-falls into bed and pulls the covers up, and he watches the door warily.

He has a bad feeling roiling up in his gut, and he doesn’t know if it’s because of his illness or if it’s because of the possibility that there is a stranger in his house, that the stranger might be here to attack him or hurt him or take him away from here somehow —

“Steve?” 

Steve shakes his head. He doesn’t recognize the voice. It’s nowhere near Bucky’s.

Steve swallows, and says, “Go away,” but the words come out as a breathless croak.

The door to the room opens, and the first thing that Steve notices is the flash of white. A long white coat, a stethoscope in dark green. Salt-and-pepper hair, and smudged fingerprints around the edges of the spectacles. 

“Hello, Steve,” the man dressed as a doctor says. “I was told you were feeling a little bit under the weather?”

“I am,” Steve rasps. “Don’t remember talking to you.”

“I was sent here,” the doctor says. He is carrying a bag, and the bag lands on Steve’s nightstand with a _thump_. Out comes a small black case.

Steve eyes the case apprehensively. “Did Bucky send you?”

The doctor doesn’t reply.

Steve watches him open the black case. Its lock yields with a soft _click_. 

“Having trouble sleeping, or trouble waking up?” the doctor asks after a moment.

“Trouble sleeping,” Steve says, despite himself.

“Ah. I thought as much. Well, sleeping will help you recover from your illness, won’t it? I’d like to give you a little something to let you sleep.”

“I’ll take it if it’s a pill or something I can drink,” Steve says. He wishes he could move over to Bucky’s side of the bed. He wants to move away from the doctor. But he doesn’t have the strength to resist when the doctor extracts his arm from the blankets.

“Relax, Steve,” the doctor says. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Please give me some medicine I can drink,” Steve insists, though his voice is nowhere near as commanding as the doctor’s.

“I’m afraid I’ve only got something that has to be administered via syringe.” The doctor shows Steve the contents of the small black case. A vial of clear fluid, and a plastic syringe with a hypodermic needle attached.

“I’d — rather not,” Steve says. “Could you go away and leave me alone, now, please?”

“I can’t do that, Steve.” Apologetic. Firm.

Steve does fight, now, when the doctor tears the sterile wrapping around the syringe open: he tries to squirm away, tries to get out of the bed, but he doesn’t have the strength to get to his feet, much less to pull away at last when the doctor takes his arm in a firm grip.

“Don’t do this, please don’t do this,” Steve says, and he feels them again, those pricking prickling pains up and down his forearms, needles driven into his veins over and over again.

“I’m sorry, Steve. I’m so sorry.”

Needle in his skin, a real one, and the doctor is pressing down on the barrel. 

Steve groans, shakes his head, and falls abruptly into darkness, before he can say Bucky’s name.

 _twelve_  
“Steve? Steve, I’m home,” he calls.

He steps into the house, and the house is — cold, suddenly.

Cold like a draft creeping in around his feet. Cold like winter trying to crawl into his skin and snuff out the warmth of his own heart. Cold pinpricks up and down his arm, that no amount of sudden shaking or rubbing can chase away.

Cold enough that he almost sees his own breath hanging before him, a bad kind of mist that gets into his eyes.

He scrubs furiously at his face, trying to see clearly.

The rooms he walks through and walks past have their doors hanging open. Cold everywhere, and the susurrus of icy winds following in his wake.

Empty rooms.

Empty rooms growing cold and dark, and no sign of Steve in the corners. No familiar and well-loved weight and warmth coming up on him. 

The only voice in his house is his own and it sounds small, even as he repeats Steve’s name, even as he looks in vain in the nooks and crannies.

The house shivers and so do his steps, tentative, stirring strange and unfamiliar echoes.

Upstairs, to the bedroom, and everything seems to be in order here. The bedsheets are still creased and the pillows are still in disarray — but there’s no one in the bed, and there’s no one in the house except for Bucky and the disconsolate echoes of his voice.

He sinks onto the foot of the bed. Here, too, there is no lingering warmth. There is instead the heavy impression of snow piled in drifts, cold piled on his skin, holding him fast in wintry claws. “Steve,” he whispers, over and over again, and no one answers.

He doesn’t know how long he stays there, barely breathing, slowly freezing. When he looks up, when he comes back to himself, the day has turned into the deep of the night. Darkness smeared into the windows, and shadows that belong to no one walking to and fro past the door.

Bucky reaches out, futile gesture, with the arm that feels like it might be bleeding, with the hand that’s gone cold and numb.

No one takes his hand, and no one touches his arm, and his voice goes unheard into the cold night, with the snow suddenly beginning to fall and the sound of each flake settling upon the house like the sound of a door closing between Bucky and everything else.

The next day piles insult upon injury. Waking up alone. The idea of familiar weight and familiar warmth surrounding him is a long-distant memory, receding further and further with every passing moment.

There is a weight on his mouth that feels like an almost-forgotten kiss, like an important name, and he gropes aimlessly for that sensation, for the sound that he needs to remember.

Something with an S and an E, he thinks.

Who was it?

Snow, falling onto the bed, piling quietly onto the floor. One of the windows is open, or perhaps he opened it at some point. He can’t remember doing it. 

The voice of the wind fills the house with ghostly, half-heard words. Light reflects off the snow and fills the spaces with pallid light.

Bucky holds up his hands and looks at them, and one is still hurting. Pinpricks that seem to let the ice in, the unsettling cold. Winter steals into his veins, leaving him shivering, leaving him aching, unable to snatch back the warmth that’s been stolen from him.

A sound that he needs to remember, and the shadow of a missing weight by his side.

He looks listlessly around the room. Missing details. Photographs of himself, over and over again, arrayed in ragged lines on one shelf. 

Why are there so many photographs of himself?

Why are there photographs of empty chairs, an unoccupied table, a coffee cup with a few drops of milk on the rim? Two towels laid out on a sunny beach, and one of them is empty, uncreased, unused. A table laid for two, lit by garlands of tiny electric lights, but only one set of cutlery has been used or moved. 

A stray thought. Things gone missing, or perhaps someone, and he doesn’t know who that someone might be.

Bucky falls back into the too-big bed, and piles the covers on in some kind of futile gesture against the snow and against the cold and against the wind, and the name he can’t find drags him back down into a restless, pained sleep.

 _thirteen_  
Something hurts in Steve’s arm, sharp and sudden, and he grits his teeth and opens his eyes, and the first breath he takes hits him like an imagined gunshot to the gut, cold and shocking and painful, racing down his shredded nerves. Aftershocks of terrifying sensation, leaving him breathless and paralyzed and, briefly, completely unable to move.

A face swims into view above him. Disorienting. He’s not sure he knows where he is, and he doesn’t know why he’s not sure.

“Steve,” says the man who is looking down at him, and Steve stares, and memory stings at him, trying to make him produce a name or some other sign of recognition. Clearly this man knows him; does that mean that Steve knows who he is in turn?

A moot point. “It’s me, it’s Bruce,” the man says. “Do you remember me?”

Steve looks at Bruce. Salt-and-pepper hair, dirt-smudged lenses framed in battered black plastic, lines in his face that are obvious even with the thick five-o’clock shadow.

And he does remember. 

Bruce is — not quite a medic. Someone who knows far too much about sedatives, and about field first aid, and about gunshot wounds, be they imaginary or real.

Bruce is someone who’s seen death in dreams, over and over again, and has from time to time been the cause of a death or two himself.

Slowly the words flow onto the tip of Steve’s tongue. “You’re Tony Stark’s Chemist.”

“I’m sort of head Chemist at Stark Dreamshare, yes,” is Bruce’s reply, slow and deliberate words. His hands are in full view, not moving, palms out and empty. “Do you remember Natasha?”

Steve looks beyond Bruce. A woman with a bright startling shock of red hair. Shrewd and calculating eyes. Her hands, too, are out where Steve can see them, framed by the cracked brown of her leather jacket. 

“Natasha,” Steve repeats. 

“We work together,” Natasha says. “I watch your back, and you watch mine.”

Steve nods, slowly. “I remember you.”

Bruce asks, “What else do you remember?” 

Slowly, slowly, like a glacier grinding forward, the memories trickle back into Steve’s head: dreams. An objective that had only seemed simple when they were only looking at the models. The bodies of dead projections. 

“Dreams within dreams,” he hears himself say.

Bruce nods. “Yes. You went down at least two levels more compared to the rest of us.”

“Not willingly,” Steve tells him.

“Not willingly. We were trying to break into a subconscious that was completely militarized and then some.”

“Did I go down alone?” Steve asks, after a moment. “I think I wasn’t supposed to go down alone.”

“You didn’t,” Natasha said. “I went down to the second level with you. And then to the third.”

“Three levels?” Steve shakes his head in disbelief.

“Four.”

His eyes swing to Bruce. He stares. He can’t help himself. “Four,” he repeats, incredulous.

“Four levels,” Bruce confirms, nodding. Now his hands are moving. He is putting his hands in his pockets. He is hunching his shoulders. He looks like he’s trying to make himself smaller.

What is Bruce afraid of?

“I didn’t know,” Steve says, still trying to understand what’s going on, “that it was possible for _anyone_ to go down four levels. Not even Cobb, or his wife if the rumors were true — ”

“You did,” Natasha says. “And someone else went down to the fourth level with you. Not me.”

Something heavy and dark and fearful drops into Steve’s stomach, or perhaps drops out of it. He can’t quite tell. He thinks he might already be shaking. “Who,” he asks, and can’t make himself look at either of them as the word is pulled out of him.

Silence.

And then: “I work with you,” Natasha said. “Which means I also work with your partner. Are you awake enough to remember him? Your partner?”

Steve freezes. “Bucky,” he whispers. “Oh god, Bucky — ”

And that’s when he turns his head.

Details. He processes details first. The couch is too small for its occupant. No, don’t look at the face yet, and don’t look at the bandages. Don’t look at the blood.

Steve notices the PASIV for the first time and draws in a shocked breath through the teeth that he’s now grinding together in the attempt to avoid a full-blown panic — an attempt that very nearly goes awry in the next instant, because he knows what it means when the PASIV is in use without a timer. He knows the dangers of getting lost inside powerful sedatives and the subconscious.

Two IV lines leading from the machine. One ends near his arm, separated from him, and if he squints at the needle on the end of that line he imagines red. Himself, a tangible trace of what lives within the confines of his skin, left on that sharp point.

He makes himself look at the other line. Makes himself look at where it leads.

It terminates in the skin of someone’s forearm. The cannula enters the skin very near the healing, faint yellow-brown edges of an old bruise. 

Someone who is sleeping. Someone who is not moving. A rigid posture, and white bandages wound around the torso: white bandages stained with various shades of red and brown. New blood, dried blood, seeping out.

Steve swallows around the lump in his throat and raises his eyes to the other sleeper’s face.

A familiar face. Familiar eyebrows, and familiar lines between them, drawing together even in the deepest of grasping sleep. Closed eyes, and the faintest idea of breathing. The ghosts of bruises and old wounds and new scars around the throat, disappearing into the collar of his shirt. A tell-tale tiny star-shaped memento of a hair-raising near-death experience, still pressed into the skin, still marking it, just below the sleeper’s temple.

“Bucky.” The name falls from Steve’s lips. He tried to stop it; he’s obviously failed. Now he presses his hand over his mouth. The question that comes next, that is necessary, perforce becomes muffled. “Who shot him?” He can’t stop looking at where the blood must be coming from, somewhere in Bucky’s midsection. 

“We don’t know,” Natasha says. 

Now that Steve’s listening to her he can hear the peculiar change in her words, the sudden sharp edges of her consonants, the clipping of her vowels. An old accent, worn down, worn uneasily, and one that he’s only heard on a bare handful of occasions.

He tears his eyes from Bucky’s sleeping form, and he turns and looks at her.

Natasha is much paler than she has any right to be. Ugly lines around her mouth, faint, telling the story.

She’s afraid.

He remembers seeing a look much like the one she’s wearing now on a job gone wrong, with all of them facing near-certain torment, sent back again and again into nightmares to die and then woken up only for the process to repeat itself. They escaped COBOL only because they’d been incredibly, undeservedly lucky. 

She had looked afraid then, even in the midst of their unhoped-for rescue, and she looks exactly like afraid now.

“When I woke up,” Bruce says, “our location was clear of hostiles. There were, if I remember, at least five dead bodies in the room.”

“Did our team get out?” Steve asks. He has to. Responsibility appears on his shoulders, or he feels it again, as heavy as millstones. The others in this room who are awake and conscious are looking to him, and it is his task to look back at them. 

“Yes,” Natasha said.

“And Bucky — ” He blinks. How can he not remember that part? Why is he forgetting the part where someone, _anyone_ , must have seen that Bucky hadn’t been in any shape to be moved? Why can’t he remember getting here? Why does it feel like the first time he’s looking, when he looks at the wound in Bucky’s midsection?

He looks again at the two of them, at Bruce and Natasha, and this time he looks just in time to catch them out. Guilt, fleeting, on black wings, on Natasha’s face and on Bruce’s.

Steve takes a deep breath. Forces himself to speak normally. Forces his eyes back to Bucky’s stillness. “Tell me what happened.”

The first answer is a pause that stretches, and stretches, and Steve closes his eyes. Reaches out for Bucky’s unmoving hand. He doesn’t miss, and he knows that he’s holding on to Bucky with a grip that will leave bruises, and he also knows that Bucky isn’t returning that grip.

Bucky never has. Never had. 

Steve has only ever held Bucky’s hand as an invasion of Bucky’s privacy.

Steve has only ever wanted Bucky from afar.

Bruce clears his throat, and Steve looks at him.

“We ran into trouble on the way out,” Bruce begins, but not before he cuts another glance Natasha’s way. “When you woke up you said you’d done it. And that we had to get out in a hurry. We managed to clean up, managed to get into the cars — and then we ran straight into an ambush.”

“That you had planned for beforehand,” Natasha says, looking reluctant to continue with the story. “I remember asking you why we had to plan for something like that. All you said was that you knew our Mark, and that you didn’t trust some of the other people that we had to take on the job with us, and that we had to prepare for everything.”

“What exactly do you remember about the job itself, Steve?”

 _the job_  
Silence hits the table like a thunderclap. It is broken only by the quiet tap of fingers on the scarred wooden surface. Steve has heard that sound over and over again in his years in the dreamshare, though, and he can allow that sound to recede from his immediate attention — though he doesn’t. 

He has to listen to Bucky, has to listen for him, because if he doesn’t, Bucky will go haring off on some solo job or another, and Bucky is still sporting the bruises from the last time that happened.

Steve himself has only just lost the stitches from that particular escapade.

He tells himself Bucky’s sheer lack of instinct for self-preservation is the only reason he’s watching Bucky.

Steve takes a deep breath, and looks around at the frankly skeptical expressions.

“Okay, so I guess it’s up to me to state _some_ of the obvious problems here,” Morse drawls after a few moments. “Starting with, _two teams_. Why two teams?”

“You don’t take just _one_ team along with you,” Natasha says, just barely on the edge of snapping, “when you’re going up against a Mark who knows about dreamshare.”

“We aren’t just going up against a Mark who knows about dreamshare, we’re going after a Mark who used to work in dreams himself,” Danvers says. “I understand why we’re going after him, and frankly, I would have almost done this on a volunteer basis — ”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” Steve mutters.

“But that’s precisely it, Rogers. I’m here as a merc, same as you, same as the others — and I’m not doing the job until I’m sure I’ve gotten half my promised payment. And it’s a substantial inducement, I’ll give you and our mysterious benefactor that. It’s still not going to be enough. I’m still going to be having serious misgivings all the way until someone presses the big yellow button on the shiny briefcase.”

He nods and puts his hands behind his back. “I appreciate candor as much as the next person, Danvers. I’m glad everyone has questions, actually. It means that around this table we really do have the right team for the job.”

“You’re just going to call it a job,” Hill mutters with some disbelief. “When in all actuality we’re going to _wipe the slate clean_. And it’s not just any slate.”

“Is he some kind of boogeyman that no one here’s actually going to mention the Mark’s name? I thought we were all well past the stage where dreams make us shit our pants,” Bucky suddenly says. “If you ask me, Loki Laufeyson’s had this coming for _years_.”

“We’re well aware of him, thank you,” Barton mutters after a moment. “Since he’s managed to burn most of us here. As in epic burnination.”

“Yeah, so, why are we focusing on being scared of him? Why aren’t we focusing on, I don’t know, getting payback?”

Steve sighs, looks around the table, walks around it, until he’s standing next to Bucky, until Bucky can see his frown. “Because there’s going to be nothing at all easy about wiping Loki’s subconscious clean. It’s going to be the hardest thing anyone here is ever going to try.”

“I call that a challenge.”

Bruce finally speaks up. “And I would agree with you, but only up to a certain point.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow at him. “Which is?”

“We have to remember that he knows us, that he’s worked with us, that he’s seen what we carry around in our own heads. He’s got the lay of the land. We have to find a way to either negate that or to turn it against him. But good luck with changing your subconscious. Old habits — or should I say, old thoughts. Old beliefs.”

That makes Bucky growl and look down at his hands. The tapping fingers are now still.

Steve intervenes, then, before anyone else can react. “Anyone here who’s interested in a refresher course in memory fortresses, I can put you in touch with Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr.”

The words are met with shudders and, in Danvers’s case as well as Hill’s, a not-quite-hidden middle finger.

“Maybe I speak for everyone else here, Rogers,” Barton says, “when I say that as much as those guys are on the side of the angels, _I do not want them inside my head_. There is such a thing as too much insight, and Xavier has it, and Lehnsherr can _find_ it, and no. Just no.”

“So find another way to lock up tight before we go into Loki’s mind,” Steve says, quiet and firm at once. “Easier said than done, I know. But it needs to be done. You all know why.”

Downcast eyes. Bucky mutters, and the words sound very much like _catatonia_ and _Tony fucking Stark_.

That latter phrase makes Bruce flinch and hunch his shoulders.

“Last chance to back out,” Steve says, watching the others, and trying to keep his poker face on.

He’s considering taking that refresher course.

He’s not interested in Loki Laufeyson ferreting out his secrets. He has to let Bucky into his head for this job, and he’d rather that Bucky didn’t see all the things he’s hiding from him. Hopelessness, and the guttering remains of the torch that he’s been carrying all this time. Dreams both idle and furtive, tinged with the lightning flash of forbidden need around the edges.

Can Xavier and Lehnsherr teach him how to hide these things from Loki?

More importantly, can they teach him how to hide these things from Bucky?

“How much of Loki are we trying to erase, and why can’t we just drop him into Limbo?” Natasha mutters.

“Do you actually want to run the risk of him breaking through and then, I don’t know, I’m ashamed of myself for actually thinking this, _being able to reach into anyone’s dreams_?” is Barton’s reply. “I wouldn’t put it past him. I can’t assume that he doesn’t, in fact, have that ability. You’ve seen the dreams he’s built — in my head, in yours, hell, in the heads of everyone here. You know what he can make you feel like.”

“I really didn’t want to carry that mental image around, thank you so much.”

Steve blinks. The conversation’s started up again without him: Hill and Danvers and Morse are arguing over dream levels. Natasha and Barton are sniping at each other, glaring daggers all the while. Bruce has retreated into a corner, and the smoke rising from his cigarette moves in a jerky, trembling, upwards stream.

He’s surprised when his eyes meet Bucky’s. When Bucky’s mouth moves, silently.

“I believe in you, Steve.”

Steve looks away, then. The words mean one thing when he wants them to mean something else.

He walks away from the table. One ear still on the conversations that he leaves behind. He pulls up the email app on his mobile phone and hesitates for only a moment before he starts composing a message.

_My team, or teams, got stuck with the job of wiping Loki Laufeyson’s slate clean. Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated._

_I also need to remember how to lock my memories away._

He doesn’t have to wait long for a response: _Come as soon as you can. Xavier._

 _fifteen_  
“Four levels of dreams,” Steve answers, in the here and now. He’s still looking at Bucky. He’s still aware of Bruce and Natasha.

But every cell of his body is clamoring for sleep. For dreams.

He remembers the dreams, now.

He remembers the job and he remembers falling awake, and he remembers — 

He remembers the Limbo he and Bucky had built together.

“That you woke up from. But Bucky didn’t.” Natasha sounds sad. He’s never heard her sound purely sad before. He’s more used to waspish words, to the crackling edges of whatever anger or other kind of fuel she carries around with her, fuel for the fire of her steady trigger finger, the insight that lights uncanny sparks in her eyes.

Now she sounds sad. There is a hitch in her words, clipped as usual, but somehow she sounds like she’s standing on unsteady ground. Cliffs crumbling beneath her feet, giving way to the ocean’s furious pummeling.

“Who shot him,” Steve asks, almost under his breath.

“We don’t know,” Bruce says. “We don’t even know why we were as lucky as we were. You woke up and you said the job was done. You’d wiped Loki clean.”

“Not an inception.”

“We never set out to do that. We simply did as we’d been asked to do. We took away Loki’s dreams. We took away everything he knew about people like you and me. About Somnacin and sedatives and PASIVs. Who taught him how to break into dreams. Who taught him how to move around in them. The mechanics of lucid dreaming. We had been asked to wipe all of that away from him. And you woke up, and you said you’d done it.”

“The last level was inside Bucky’s head,” Steve says, as the memories trickle back in. “How could I have done it if — ”

“He held it together. I don’t know how. But I think he held it together because of _you_.” The sound that follows Natasha’s words sounds like a quiet, quiet sob. One that has barely escaped before being reined back in and restrained.

“Me,” Steve says.

Bucky’s face. Unnatural sleep. Blood on bandages.

“You did it for me,” Steve whispers to Bucky, and he closes his eyes now because he can’t keep them open. The weight of tears, and the weight of the dreams that they’d dreamed together, the years and the days and nights.

The enormous staggering weight of the Limbo that he and Bucky had built: confusing, because somehow they’d both remembered guns and vigilance and the constant sense of having to look over their shoulders.

A confusing and beautiful Limbo.

One where they’d simply fallen into each other.

The utter contrast between those dreams and the here and now: the reality of Bucky bleeding his life away, the reality of Bucky sleeping the rest of his life away.

_“Bucky.”_

The name slips from Steve’s lips before he can stop it.

“Steve,” Bruce says. “Bucky needs medical attention.”

“I can see that,” Steve says wearily. “And we are people who shouldn’t set foot in hospitals, who shouldn’t be out in broad daylight. What do you want me to do?”

“I — at least you can allow him to be treated. Not here. A private hospital. The person who asked you to do this job — ”

“They just wanted the job done, Bruce, they didn’t talk about anything else. We pick up after ourselves in the aftermath, and we move on. As we always have done.”

“And Bucky? Steve, if he’s dying — ”

“Can you stop him from dying?” Steve hates that he actually sounds hopeful. He’s seen gut wounds before. He knows what they mean. Even prompt medical attention might not be able to save the victim of such a wound, and who knows how long Bucky’s been here, nowhere near any kind of medical attention.

“I can’t. This is beyond anything I know. All I know is that he’s lost a lot of blood.”

Steve looks at the bandages. “He has,” he says, and the words hang before him, bleak and blank. “How much time does he have left?”

This time, silence is the only answer he gets.

He takes advantage of it. He pulls the PASIV closer. There is an extra IV line, still sterile, still unused. He reaches for it and goes through the cannulation process.

There are no questions from the other two, not even as he runs the line into his veins, not even as he takes his own old line out from the PASIV and plugs the new one in. Now all that remains is for him to press the button, and he’ll fall asleep again.

He’s going to find a way back down into Limbo. He’s already done it, though he has no idea of how recently that was, because he’s lost all sense of real-world time. He wants to go back down the levels, and he wants to find his way back.

Back to the house with Bucky in it.

A vague memory arises of a sickbed, and himself waiting anxiously for Bucky to return.

Bucky’s hand, warm around his, a steady and firm grip.

“Steve,” Natasha says.

“I’m going to sleep,” he tells her. “I’m going to find Bucky, and I’m going to stay with him. Until l — ” He takes a deep breath. “For the rest of the time that he has, or doesn’t have.” He takes a deep breath, and knows he’s on rough ice, on the verge of tears. “You know why, Natasha. Of all the others, you know. You figured it out.”

She nods, once, and there are lines of fear and pain in her face. “I know. And that’s why I’m not stopping you. None of us are. But Steve.”

“Yes.”

“What happens next? To you. To Bucky.”

“Maybe I’ll just keep on sleeping.” The mere thought of waking up again is already making him ill. The idea of waking up into a world where Bucky will most definitely be gone — no. No. He has to reject it. He’d rather not wake up. “You know a lot about me — if you figured out the part about Bucky, then you probably know about my passwords and my bank accounts. You’re welcome to them — you too, Bruce.”

“Steve,” Bruce says, and the word sounds like one last attempt at sanity. It also sounds like farewell.

After that he hears nothing but receding footsteps, and one last quiet sigh. A soft sound. He thinks maybe Natasha was the source, though he’s only ever heard her sigh in exasperation, or because she won’t cry out even when she’s been shot or wounded in the dreams.

Steve checks the sedatives still in the PASIV, and looks at the graven lines in Bucky’s drawn and sleeping face, and presses the button.

Sleep. Dreams. Down.

 _sixteen_  
There must have been a house, Bucky thinks, and the house must have collapsed or vanished somehow, without him knowing about it, because the next time he opens his eyes he’s still in bed, and the bed is sitting in the middle of a vast landscape of falling snow. Snow in heaps around the bedframe, snow falling onto his covers, and snow tangled in his hair. When had his hair grown so long and so unkempt?

He’s warm, at the very least, or he’s not cold. Snow falls down in drifts and mounds over his blanket-covered feet, and he’s not freezing.

Where is the house, Bucky thinks, and immediately he wonders how he remembers the details of the house. The insistent sweet scent of shaved wood, and the scratch of pencil across paper. The feel of worn and loved leather beneath his fingertips. Sunlight slanting in through a series of windows, lighting up the heavy table and the plain white crockery, caught glittering and sparkling in a glass of cold clear water.

He’s sitting in a world full of falling snow. The skies above him are blank and uniformly gray, and the snow falls quietly, relentlessly, carefully everywhere descending.

There are shapes like mountains and jagged peaks far away in the distance, a ghostly range; and if he takes a deep breath he thinks he might smell faraway pines, evergreen in the midst of this snowclad storm, though he can’t see those trees, and he thinks it might be nice to see them, one of them — anything to break the monotony of the snow piling up around his bed.

The bed, when he looks at it again, seems too large for just him. There is another pillow next to the one he’d been sleeping on. Pale-golden strands of hair, not too long. Whose hair is it?

The same person who’s left a rut in the side of the bed he’s not occupying, he thinks. A rut in the shape of shoulders and hips, long lean limbs.

Bucky touches the blankets on that side of the bed. Inexplicably warm.

Who was here?

Who had he been sleeping next to?

And why has that person left him here alone?

Bucky racks his memories, merciless, trying to find that face, that name. Some way of holding on to the presence that is missing from his bed. A smile? No, a kiss. Sweet lingering warmth, always careful, even while dancing on the knife-edge between passion and violence. The longed-for aftermath of bruises wrapped around Bucky’s wrists, the delicious ache in his muscles and bones, well-used, well-made-much-of. Kisses marked into his skin with teeth, the teasing edge of welcome pain.

He closes his eyes, and imagines.

A kiss over an old scar. Perhaps the ghost of a through-and-through bullet wound, or the silvered line of a knife biting deeply into skin and sinew. A kiss that was a benediction, that was not a glossing over of the memory. A kiss that was acceptance, and that was gratitude, because the other person’d lived to tell the tale, had come back through the pain and through the terrible things to return to Bucky and tell him all about it.

Who is this person, and where have they gone, and are they coming back?

Or is Bucky the one who left, the one who has to come back?

Bucky shifts restlessly in the bed, and there’s a soft and distant kind of pain that pierces briefly through him. It goes away when he settles, curled loosely, perhaps to leave space for who he’s missing.

As he closes his eyes he thinks of someone calling his name, of someone looking for him, and he wants to say “I’m here!” but sleep pulls him down, pulls him under. Sleep steals his voice, leaves him in this landscape of bed and falling snow, alone.

He wishes he weren’t alone.

He wishes he weren’t missing — whoever it is that he’s missing, because it doesn’t make sense to miss someone whose face is a blur in his memories if it even exists, whose voice murmurs silent words to him. Imaginary warmth in imaginary arms, wrapping around him, holding on to him.

 _seventeen_  
Steve falls, and the snow falls around him, an endless world of swirling white.

He thinks he should be cold, but he isn’t, and that doesn’t make sense because there are only blankets swaddled around his shoulders. Blankets should mean nothing in a snowstorm like this: a silent blizzard, with the snow blowing this way and that, haphazard patterns, and he falls among those falling snowflakes, and he’s not cold. Not in pain. This kind of weather should have started attacking him, started eating at him. Frostbite and lassitude.

That’s not what is hurting him.

He falls, and he automatically reaches out for a hand to hold, but there’s no one there.

He has to remember why he’s here, and why there’s no one to hold his hand.

He has to remember — him.

Bucky.

Steve falls headfirst into a drift and the impact doesn’t drive the breath out of him. The snow muffles the sounds of the world. The quiet moan of the wind, and the quiet crunch of the ice beneath his bare feet.

He pulls the blankets over his shoulders, wipes the snowflakes from his eyes. He gets to his feet and looks around. White as far as the eye can see, except —

Something dark in the distance. Something that is not this falling snow. It’s as good a direction to head as any, and he takes a deep cold breath and he turns his feet toward that dark thing in the distance.

The snow falls around him. His feet sink into drifts and heaps.

Bucky, he thinks. He sloughs away the idea of topside — the idea of the world that isn’t part of his dreams, their dreams — and he might have done that already, once or twice. Somewhen.

He’s looking for the world they’d built together, the world they’d taken back day by day from the biting and grasping edges of Limbo.

He thinks about that world, and the memories that come to him are almost enough to make him smile into the snow and into the endless white.

Bucky stretching and yawning as he woke, with the sun pouring golden light onto his hands that were loosely curled into fists. Bucky frowning into a pot full of bubbling stuff on the stove, filling the kitchen with bright savory smells and spices. Bucky sitting in a patch of bright green grass, the lines in his face lit up with laughter.

He thinks about the recurring memory of holding Bucky’s hand — of Bucky holding his hand. Warm fingers twined into his, a welcome weight. Under the covers, between their breakfast dishes.

That memory, that dream, does make him smile.

He wants to hold Bucky’s hand again, and this time, he makes himself a promise.

 _If_ he finds Bucky, _if_ he can make it all the way down those levels — he’ll never let Bucky go. He’ll stick to Bucky’s side. He’ll never let Bucky out of his sight.

If Bucky will have him. If Bucky can remember him.

Steve knows a little of how Limbo works, and what he doesn’t know he can interpolate from what he’s heard, what he’s aware of.

In this case — in his and Bucky’s case — they’d apparently found each other somewhere in Limbo, and they’d built a world together. Built a life together. Fell asleep next to each other, woke up next to each other.

He’s not quite clear on _how_ that happened, but he’s determined to do something about it, now that he’s plunged back towards Limbo.

He has to find the world that he and Bucky built.

His feet move, and take him closer to the dark thing in the distance, and now he squints and he can see that it’s — it’s a bed.

Steve picks up the pace. The snow crunches beneath his feet and tries to suck him in as he attempts to run, but he runs anyway, and he’s almost out of breath when he gets to the bed. When he reaches out for the wooden frame.

The wood beneath his fingertips is not cold at all, and neither is the depression in the pillows in the approximate size and shape of someone’s head, though that depression is also filling with snow.

Dark strands on the pillow, longer than Steve has seen, but mostly recognizable all the same.

On the other side of the bed, where Steve himself would have been lying, sits a PASIV.

He nods. He understands. Down the rabbit hole. Down into the levels of his dreams, of Bucky’s dreams, until he can find the place that they’d been in together.

Steve adds his blankets to the pile already on the bed, and climbs in. Lingering warmth.

Pinch of a hollow needle connected to an IV line.

He takes a deep breath, and presses the button, and falls — 

Falls asleep — 

Falls into the snow.

One name on his lips — 

Down and down and down, until he can find the man with that name, find him again and never let him go.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2014 Marvel Bang @ http://marvel-bang.livejournal.com/
> 
> Initial prompt and story ideas from Kannibal. 
> 
> Betaed by afrocurl, Gloria Mundi, and Erlilia Elyr.
> 
> Title from the Mass Effect 3: Citadel OST track “Lost in You” (extended version [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmN3eD1O0lw)). 
> 
> This story incorporates the main characters from Inception, as well as characters from several Avengers rosters and related storylines thereto. The versions of Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr found here are influenced, with permission, by the versions of them that appear in Kaydee Falls's [Boden's Mate](http://archiveofourown.org/works/256615) and [Queen's Gambit](http://archiveofourown.org/works/259935). 
> 
> Major props to friends and enablers from Inception fandom, without whose knowledge and dizzying creativity this story could never have been written.
> 
> And happiest of birthdays to my artist Caputell :)
> 
> \-----
> 
> I am also on [tumblr](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/).


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